Why Canada Chooses Decline
And What Budget 2025 Really Tells Us
Canada did not drift into weak growth, low productivity, shrinking investment, and declining living standards by accident. This trajectory is not random or mysterious. Canada is in decline because the system prioritizes stability for insiders over prosperity for the country. Budget 2025 is the clearest example yet that Ottawa no longer aims to reverse the slide. It aims to manage it, soften it, and dress it up as progress.
The government marketed this budget as a generational reset. A plan to rebuild productivity and close the gap with the United States. A blueprint to “supercharge growth.” But Canadians are not buying it. A new national survey shows that only 18 percent believe Budget 2025 will make Canada’s financial situation better. Twice as many believe it will make things worse. And half the country says they expect no improvement whatsoever in their own personal finances.
Budget 2025 is not a transformation. It is confirmation that the country is choosing decline.
1. Productivity requires disruption. Ottawa refuses to touch it.
Productivity is not complicated. Canada needs faster permitting. Better tax design. Simpler rules. More competition. Less duplication. Clearer authority between levels of government. Fewer protected industries. Real internal trade mobility. Lower barriers for investment.
None of that appears in Budget 2025.
Ottawa avoids real reform because reform creates short-term losers. Bureaucracies lose control. Provinces lose fiefdoms. Unions face restructuring. Crown corporations face competition. Established industries lose protection. These groups have political leverage. The people who would benefit years from now do not.
This is why a majority of Canadians say this budget will not improve the country’s financial situation. They instinctively understand that nothing structural changed.
2. The budget protects insiders, not workers or families.
Look at where the money flows. The civil service remains untouched. Administrative spending stays high. Transfers grow. The luxury tax is lifted on private aircraft and yachts. Capital spending explodes while operational discipline collapses.
Meanwhile, Canadians say they do not expect the budget to help their household finances. Only a small minority believes it will lower costs or improve economic security. The public sees clearly what Ottawa will not admit. This budget protects the political ecosystem around the government. It does not protect the workers who carry the economy.
3. The PBO exposed the budget’s entire framework as a mirage.
The government claimed a new “operating vs capital” split would show discipline. The operating side would balance. The deficit would be isolated in capital. It sounded responsible. It was meant to convey seriousness.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer destroyed that illusion. His review shows the operating budget remains in deficit even after all the new measures. The central promise of the budget is not true. The architecture of the plan cannot support the government’s own claims.
Voters agree. More Canadians believe the budget will harm the financial outlook than improve it. A government cannot sell fiscal innovation when the watchdog shows it is a shell game.
4. The spending trajectory shows drift, not reform.
The C.D. Howe Institute compared spending projections from 2022, 2023, 2024, and now 2025. The results are staggering. The government has added roughly seventy billion dollars in new spending for 2025 and 2026 compared to what it projected only three years ago.
That is not discipline. It is autopilot spending. And Canadians sensed this even before the numbers were released. In the pre-budget poll, most Canadians said they expected a larger deficit than the government had forecast. They were right.
5. The productivity story is impossible on its own terms.
The government claims that Budget 2025 will unleash five hundred billion dollars in private investment. Even if that were true, the payoff would barely move the needle. Canada would only reverse one fifth of the productivity decline, and even that modest recovery would take until 2050. This is the best case scenario.
The public sees the gap between rhetoric and reality. Only 18 percent believe this budget will improve the nation’s outlook. That is not cynicism. That is basic economic literacy.
6. Why Canada accepts this.
Canada’s system rewards caution, not courage. Every bottleneck has a constituency. Every delay has a defender. Every protected sector has a lobby behind it. Every inflated administrative structure has a union or department guarding it. Productivity reform threatens the people who benefit most from the status quo. So reform never arrives.
Canadians understand this intuitively. When asked whether this budget will improve their personal finances, most said no. They know the system is not built to help them. It is built to protect itself.
7. Budget 2025 is proof the system cannot fix itself.
A real productivity budget would have given Canada national permitting reform, a modern tax system, genuine competition, a simpler regulatory environment, faster project approvals, and internal trade mobility that actually means something.
None of that happened.
Instead, we got a complex accounting exercise, a rising deficit buried inside new terminology, and a speech that claims ambition while delivering another year of drift.
Canada is choosing decline because the people who run the system fear the pain of change more than the cost of failure. Budget 2025 did not reverse that choice. It confirmed it.
Canada deserves a government willing to choose the future. This one chose the comfort of the present.
Source
Public opinion data from: Liaison Strategies, LS National 2025, November 10
(press.liaisonstrategies.ca)